Wendell Berry’s Rabbit Is Now A Squirrel

How is marriage like poetry? Ask Wendell Berry, who wrote a 1982 essay exploring the question. Fred Sanders explores that essay’s comparison of marriage to poetry, and explains why Berry’s vituperative denunciation of same-sex marriage opponents was so inconsistent with Berry’s past writing and thinking about marriage. Excerpt from Sanders, who is as puzzled as I am, but far more irenic and charitable about it:

“It may be,” wrote Berry near the end of the essay,

that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Artists love limits. As the great formophile William Wordsworth said, they “scorn not the sonnet” with its ancient, fixed rules, just as “nuns fret not” at the convent door. Likewise, when Auguste Rodin bloviated that “no truly great man has ever confined his love to only one woman,” lovers know that Rodin should have talked less and sculpted more, for he sculpted like a demigod but spake as a fool.

It is the keeping of the form, Berry wrote, that gives us our instruction. “We had been prepared to learn what we had the poor power to expect. But fidelity to the form has driven us beyond expectation. The world, the truth, is more abounding, more delightful, more demanding than we thought.”

Sanders quotes more from Berry’s 1982 essay, which read:

Marriage is the mutual promise of a man and a woman to live together, to love and help each other, in mutual fidelity, until death. It is understood that these definitions cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance, any more than we can call a rabbit a squirrel because we preferred to see a squirrel. Poetry of the traditionally formed sort, for instance, does not propose that its difficulties should be solved by skipping or forcing a rhyme or by mutilating syntax or by writing prose. Marriage does not invite one to solve one’s quarrel with one’s wife by marrying a more compliant woman. Certain limits, in short, are prescribed – imposed before the beginning.

Sanders wants Berry to explain how he reaches his current conclusion about same-sex marriage, in light of his past writing that marriage is intrinsically one thing, and not another. So many people who back Berry in this must not know a thing about his past writing. How is it that Berry, who, despite his advanced age, is still a prolific and opinionated writer on his standard themes, only got around to saying a single word about gay marriage in 2012, in his interview with National Review, and, in his first lengthy public statement about his views, delivered a jeremiad spoken as if he were a rusticated Larry Kramer?

If Berry has changed his mind about the immutability of the essential nature of marriage, then how? Why? He owes his readers and admirers a lot more than his sneering and insults.

Many readers of this blog have defended Berry’s intemperate remarks by saying that he must only be responding to the meanness of the church towards gays in the past. Berry has certainly never been shy about condemning Christians for not living up to our beliefs, or living them out fully. That’s fine. Prophets are supposed to call us back to fidelity. If we have been cruel and unfeeling towards gays and lesbians — and we certainly have — then we must repent of that. No argument here. But that is completely beside the point. Sins of commission and omission against gay folks are not a kind of alchemy that makes marriage something it is not. What so many same-sex marriage supporters don’t seem to understand is that many of us do not believe we are free to say that marriage can be anything we want it to be. We believe that marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance.

Wendell Berry used to believe that too. Now he has apparently joined the chorus of worthies who, having not found their voice until this moment, speak as if it is as plain as day that gay marriage is just, and it always was perfectly obvious, and if it had been up to them and not those bigoted Jesus freaks, we would have had gay marriage a hundred years ago.

“Or even Greek myth: Zeus may have had many paramours, including one or two male ones; but he had only one wife.”

Yeah, I was going to add that. And when he wanted to cheat, he had to change himself into a bull or swan or other barnyard creature. And even then, Hera would find out and be waiting with a scolding that would make Dreher’s liberal groupies proud.

Sins of commission and omission against gay folks are not a kind of alchemy that makes marriage something it is not. What so many same-sex marriage supporters don’t seem to understand is that many of us do not believe we are free to say that marriage can be anything we want it to be. We believe that marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance.

Rod, you keep using Grandpa Simpson as a metaphor for Berry, but is it not also possible that the above, which is essentially, “People aren’t doing things the way they used to do them and I don’t like that!” also has a bit of Grandpa Simpson about it?

Thursday posted links to charts and articles that he misrepresented in order to argue that Southern Fundamentalists were no worse as gay bashers than anyone else.

I misrepresented nothing. Dude, you had to come up with ad hoc explanations for why three NE states, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachussetts, had such a high rate of anti-gay incidents. That’s 3 separate states.

This expresses perfectly why I’ve been so upset over Berrys SSM essay, what does he think about bisexual and transgender marriage, the point for Berry has always been there’s limits to what we can and should do, even if we want to, We may feel sorry for the blind person, but we shouldn’t give them driver licenses

There is no Evangelical culture in the big North Eastern cities, or in the NE as a whole, so even if you’re right that religious culture is behind gay hating in bit North Eastern cities, something that, knowing how secular they are, is very, very dubious, gay hating can’t really be blamed on Evangelical culture specifically, as you attempted to do. Having experience working with youth in large secular cities and rednecky rural areas, I don’t see a whole lot of difference.

If you doubt the U.S. stats there are always the Canadian ones, where there is a national police force and criminal law is federal, so this should be more uniform. Politically correct, not very Evangelical Ontario which has a political and religious culture very similar to the NE United States comes out the clear champ. I’m doubtful that discrepancies are due to better reporting, as the equally PC British Columbia and Quebec don’t have comparable rates. The redneck-y Conservative voting Western provinces (with more Evangelicals) don’t particularly stand out. Looking at individual cities doesn’t seem to reveal many patterns either.http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85f0033m/85f0033m2008017-eng.pdfhttp://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2012001/article/11635-eng.htm
Again, this doesn’t separate anti-gay incidents. I do know that immigrants tend to avoid both Quebec and the not very prosperous Maritime provinces.

Heather your angry, insulting commentary really detracts from the quality of this blog. My experience reading Rod’s blog is that Rod and the people who comment strive to be civil and polite to each other even when in disagreement. Your sweeping generalizations and mean-spirited accusations seem more suited for sites like free republic or daily kos. Just sayin…

“… more serious worries many of us might have about a slippery slope to polygamy…”

Actually, SSM is closer to the bottom — if not the bottom. If at some point polygamy gets tacked on, that would be going back up the slope. Polygamy may not be the Church’s ideal for marriage, but at least it’s marriage in the natural sense whereas SSM is just asexual.

Now of course with polygamy there are problems with the harem, but that’s another issue.

****************************
“Surely it’s the man’s prerogative to simply have changed his mind …”

Rod. Thank you for printing my post. I wasn’t sure you would, as similar ones in the past had not been.

And thank you for printing Heather’s posts over the course of this topic.

By reading her posts, which are extremely general, quite nasty, and pretty much unlike posts from earlier days … you may begin to understand what gays have gone through, and are going through.

I’ve complimented your readers frequently because whether one agrees with them or not, they are intelligent, write cogent posts, and seem ‘agreeable’. I’m not sure how many folks would consider Heather ‘agreeable”. Provacative, in-your-face, sure of herself and her beliefs, yes. Of course, that could describe all sorts of zealots of many persuasions and religions, and is not a compliment.

You know what? I grew up fairly conservative, voted Republican from Reagan in 1980 through Bush in 2004. But, to Heather, gays aren’t conservative. Gays don’t care —we’re only against conservatives.

Wow.

” Because people with a homosexuality agenda could care less about human suffering, injustice, and the horrendous violence so many people suffer. They only care about an issue if they can finger-point a conservative.”

Wow.

Rod, this commenter (and others, as pointed out by Turmarion) think the stories (episodes) we have posted are lies, are false, could never happen, or who cares about podunk KY? Because there are evil gays out there, creating massive harm all around the country.

Rod, please re-read from the beginning, as I have, at least twice the comments on this Berry issue. Are your gay commenters (or their friends) writing fiction to blame conservatives? Are they falsifying their lives to make a point on a blog?

Perhaps Heather is unaware that LGBT voters have voted in the mid-20% level for Republican candidates in recent elections. That there are the Log Republicans and GOProud, and other conservative gay votes. We may bounce around candidates a bit (ie McCain c. 2000 was much more friendly than, say, Gary Bauer). LGBT folks are conservative, moderate, liberal — Republican, Democrat, Green, Independent, and whatever. We’re your House Rep and Senator, your local state rep and senator, and even a speaker of the state house. And yes, we’re privates and colonels, and even generals. And we’re pilots and flight attendants. Ministers and bishops. Patrolmen and police chiefs. We live in tiny villages, midwest farm towns and major cities.

Heather tells us quite nicely “Deal with it” a several of her posts.

I’m usually a quite nice guy. I’ll try to be so when I say, Heather, we’re here, we’re not going anywhere, and we are loved—by our husbands, our wives, our children and our parents and family members. We’re loved and respected by our co-workers, our bosses, our underlings. The same with our neighbors and acquaintances. We’re now ‘allowed’ to marry in nine states and D.C. It’s quite likely a few more states will go our way in 2013. It’s even possible we could win one or both of the cases the US Supreme Court will decided this June.

So Heather: we’ve had years of dealing with you and people who believe as you do. Over the years, we’ve advanced in what is ‘allowed’. More and more, we *are* mainstream. Over 50% of America is now ‘with us’. Quite honestly, Heather, it is time for *you to deal with it*.

I feel at times for Rod, both good and ill, because he seems genuinely troubled by knowing gays, thinking they should have some rights, but not others, including marriage. We can see him struggle. We struggle. You, based on your writings Heather, do not struggle. You are so sure that we are all nasty, evil liberals who care not a whit about anything, any people, or our nation.

You, Heather, are so wrong, and so unable to ‘deal with it’. It is quite likely that your posts have done more to benefit ‘my’ side–and shown the truth of what Turmarion and others have written, than anything we could do to help ‘your’ side.

America is a deep, and wide and confusing, at times, nation. Pretty much all 300 million-plus of us consider ourselves patriots —for all the disagreements on issues political, social, religious, and local, we all stand together as a nation — be we white, black, red, male, female, trans, adult, teenager or youngster. We don’t let others push us around, and when we see others within our own states push one set or another around, we eventually get upset about that.

Heather, I’m gay. My partner is gay. My church is fine with that, so is his. So are our families, and so are our friends. You know what? They’ve dealt with it.

I’d also like to point out that Turmarion saying that Vermont and New Hampshire are outliers doesn’t seem to match up with the data. At the very least, if they are outliers with a high rate of anti-gay violence, they have been outliers for a long time. This wasn’t a one or two year blip.

One will also note that anti-gay violence both started at and went up to a higher level in the NE during the gay marriage debate than in the country as a whole.

Combine that with my own experience with youth in both redneckville and big secular city, and I’m sticking to my guns. Evangelical culture doesn’t seem to have much to do with anti-gay violence.

Also, no one is saying that there is no bullying or violence against gays.

I may have to correct this one. Most of us here are not denying that there is violence against gays and lesbians. We are questioning the causal link between religion, and specifically Evangelical religion, and that violence. Again take a look at that 15 years of data from Vermont.

Voting is quite meaningless, that is why people lovelovelove it. You get all the thrill of doing something without any of the work. Same goes for survey responses.

The actual data, if anyone wants to trot down to wikipedia and fire it up is that overwhelmingly gay people themselves are not interested in marrying or even cohabiting, not even when given access to ‘marriage’ as opposed to ‘civil unions’.

Gay marriage is statistically negligible, full stop. This is true across a range of countries and states.

That is the brilliance of it, really. It affects almost nobody, and thus is a very pure sort of fitness test for liberals. They can bask in their presumed moral superiority, as they have all over this post, secure in the knowledge that it is extremely unlikely to impinge in practical terms on their own daily lives.

Clamdigger: I’ve complimented your readers frequently because whether one agrees with them or not, they are intelligent, write cogent posts, and seem ‘agreeable’. I’m not sure how many folks would consider Heather ‘agreeable”. Provacative, in-your-face, sure of herself and her beliefs, yes. Of course, that could describe all sorts of zealots of many persuasions and religions, and is not a compliment.
============
Oh my, I’m glad no homosexuality or liberal activist is ever provocative, in-your-face, sure of themselves and their beliefs.

Or are these only bad things when it’s from people question your homosexuality agenda?

The overwhelming majority of people who normalize homosexuality are quite the zealots – especially given how much they are anti-science and fanatically endorse attitudes and behaviors about sexuality because they are self-serving and because it guarantees them with no accountability.

If you come here and talk about how a homosexual was beaten up in Appalachia, I suppose you think that it is not “in everyone’s faces.” But if I talk about the millions of cases where homosexuals and bisexuals beat up others, somehow it is? You talking about some homosexual beat up in Appalachia is a nice thing, but when I depict the real occurrence of millions of violent acts committed by LGBT people, that’s nasty? Excuse me?

Moreover, do you ever criticize anyone with a homosexuality agenda for being provocative? Sure of themselves?

We know you don’t. How much time do you spend on blogs talking about the little homosexual beat up in Appalachia compared to the millions of other victims beat up by LGBT people?

What I want to highlight is how much you are distorting reality. Reality includes both the incident in Appalachia with the millions and millions of victims of LGBT perpetrators.

Clamdigger: You know what? I grew up fairly conservative, voted Republican from Reagan in 1980 through Bush in 2004. But, to Heather, gays aren’t conservative. Gays don’t care —we’re only against conservatives.
================
Clamdigger – I don’t know if you are incapable of interpreting correctly what I write or if it wasn’t clear to you or if you are purposefully lying about what I think.

Whatever the reason, this is a good opportunity to clarify labels. To me, and in my writing, there are different major groups that can be called “conservative” in contemporary US. There are fiscal conservatives, foreign policy conservatives, and social conservatives, and maybe that’s not even the full main list. But these three are certainly three key ones. It is not because a person is one type of conservative, that they are conservative in all three ways. Many Republicans are not socially conservative. I believe most people who know a lot of Republicans know this – it’s plain to see.

I usually take care of writing explicitly “social conservative” and not merely “conservative” – because the latter is a very broad umbrella term, that can include, as I just explained, people who are not socially conservative. Sometimes, when the context is clearly “liberal versus conservative,” I don’t employ “socially conservative” and shorten it to “conservative” because it seems evident what the ideological opposition is.

People who have socially conservative views, in my usage of the term, are in favor of real marriage (one man, one woman), no “homosexual civil unions”; they do not normalize homosexuality, porn, promiscuity, hookups, prostitution, adultery, abortion (especially in the sense of abortion on demand), cohabitation, to name several of the most important positions.

So, yes, according to Heather, if you normalize homosexuality, i.e., you have a “gay” ideology, you cannot be socially conservative. You can be Republican, you can be conservative (depending on how you define the label), but you are not socially conservative.

And most of the time, people like you, meaning those that have your homosexuality agenda, will work against socially conservative people, and attack them (as you are doing on this blog), and undermine every effort to make the Republican party socially conservative and to promote a beautiful, wholesome, violence-free, socially conservative society.

Heather wrote: ” Because people with a homosexuality agenda could care less about human suffering, injustice, and the horrendous violence so many people suffer. They only care about an issue if they can finger-point a conservative.”

Clamdigger wrote: “Rod, this commenter (and others, as pointed out by Turmarion) think the stories (episodes) we have posted are lies, are false, could never happen, or who cares about podunk KY? ”

No, this commenter is not saying that the one case of violence you mentioned is false. We don’t know for sure, but I didn’t assume it was a lie in any case.

What I am highlighting is that for every such case you mention, we can mention thousands of cases where the perpetrator is LGBT. You know why? Because there are millions of cases of violence perpetrated by LGBT people in society.

Where is the outpour of outrage due to all violence and harm that LGBT people do in the world? If violence is bad when done in some corner of Appalachia, why isn’t it bad when it’s done all over American and the perpetrators are LGBT people?

Don’t you care enough to talk about it, and rail against it, and denounce all this violence, and make efforts to bring the guilty to justice? The majority of violence and harm perpetrated by LGBT people is granted total impunity.

Isn’t this horrible? Aren’t human rights violations bad when the perpetrator is LGBT? Isn’t harm bad if the person doing it is LGBT?

So, Rod, that’s the kind of homosexuality agenda people we have to put up with. Is Clamdigger railing against all the violent LGBT people in society – confirmed by multiple research studies and testimonies and lawsuits – or is he railing against the commenter who brings the issue to light?

Clamdigger loves to call other people nasty, and I could call him nasty too, but isn’t that descending into a mere exchange of insults? It’s also a way for Clamdigger not to deal with all the issues I’m raising. Thirdly, I can bet his next move will be to continue to avoid addressing the issues I have raised and up the volume on the way he maligns me.

Oh, I think Heather is well within the bounds of agreeable, rational, discussion. I disagree with a good deal of what she says, but she could say it in my living room and I wouldn’t feel my hospitality was violated.

There has been a good deal of violence, discrimination in employment, etc. perpetrated against people who are part-time or full time homosexual in their choice of partners. I find plenty of hypocrisy among Christians who target homosexuality. As Dr. Lewis B. Anthony posed at a men’s retreat once, no, homosexuality is not part of God’s plan, but booty call every five minutes isn’t either, so what makes you any better than them? I don’t worry about it much, because I’m not tempted. Fornication and adultery, I have to worry about, because I could find those tempting, but there is no virtue in resisting a sin one is not tempted by. I don’t know what makes men attractive — I don’t know why women put up with us.

There are some screaming fanatics, pro-gay heterosexuals as well as gay activists, who believe nothing short of universal cultural adulation and admiration will do. Too bad. There is no constitutional right to affirmative approval. There is also an unseemly level of hysteria about “the homosexual agenda.” Christians are not being driven back into catacombs.

Clamdigger will have to live with the fact that, just as Christians and Muslims can preach openly and publicly against demon rum, just as Jews and Muslims can openly and publicly denounce eating pork, just as Protestant denominations can denounce women wearing make-up, those who believe homosexuality is a sin can say so, openly and publicly.

While it’s clear that Berry has not restated his 1982 essay’s support of traditional marriage, I do not believe he has completely contradicted it, since his public statements mostly addressed 1) his opposition to government regulation of homosexual marriages, and 2) his opposition to Christian churches and parishioners in favor of government regulation of homosexual marriages.

IMO, Berry still believes, as he did in 1982, that traditional marriage “is the mutual promise of a man and a woman to live together … ,” but he believes that it would be evil, not Christian, for Christians to politic for the government to regulate adults’ marital sexual practices.

Also, IMO, government regulations should not be based on metaphors — even good poets’ metaphors.

The reason “evangelical states” have lower statistics for anti-gay violence is because they didn’t track or report anti-gay violence. Only with the recent passage of federal law requiring such statistics keeping, did they begin to even keep track. Plus there’s a lot of evidence that their hearts aren’t really in it and the efforts are quite weak in some states.

National standardization (well, weak standardization) has resulted in some better reporting and also in a statistical increase in anti-gay violence. In some areas, the increase is not just statistical. In some others, it is. Anti-religious violence (no, Heather, not by gay people) has also increased, as the federal law has prompted some states to get better about hate-crime statistics in general, too.

All of that aside, no minority group in America faces rates of assault and murder greater than that confronting LGBT people, with the exception of young black men (whose intra-community violence is covered in other threads).

In 2004, Wendall Berry embraced the power of ignorance, after his meditation on the mystery of raindrop patterns led him into an insight on the limits of perception.

“To call the unknown by its right name, ‘mystery,’ is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns,” Berry wrote Wes Jackson, Land Institute president.

Also, he continued: “This respecting of mystery obviously has something or other to do with religion, and we moderns have defended ourselves against it by turning it over to religion specialists, who take advantage of our indifference by claiming to know a lot about it.”

So, when Rod calls Berry’s new stab at the mystery of marital sex as being “inconsistent with Berry’s past writing and thinking about marriage,” Rod is holding Berry to a standard of consistency that Berry has argued is a limitation when discussing a mystery, especially when the mystery has been handed over to religion specialists, let alone political churches.

And, IMO, if anything is the mysteries of human love, sex and marriage.

A major point of Berry’s remarks that I have not seen much discussed: Religious conservatives that hope to see the government regulate sexual behavior should be careful what they wish for. Giving government that level of oversight of people’s private lives would be a Faustian bargain that we all would come to regret.

It saddens me a bit to see another post related to this topic, especially where Berry’s comments are mischaracterized so blatantly.

As I said in an earlier thread, Berry is primarily criticizing “political churches,” by which I infer him to be referring to the corporatized, mass-marketed form of Christianity that largely passes for “orthodoxy” today in America. Berry recognizes that today’s version of “orthodoxy” is a far cry from the parish-focused ministry that primarily concerns itself with issues involving real people in a fixed place and time.

Further, Berry nowhere seeks to deny the right of Christian communions to conduct their churchly affairs in accordance with their beliefs. Rather, Berry is criticizing the efforts of certain hucksters to take otherwise legitimate ecclesial concerns, and manipulate these issues to create false panic among the faithful, thereby encouraging them to place some measure of their trust (if not their money) into the hands of corporatized para-church organizations. At a point, the local church has to align its interests with those of the hucksters, so as to appear relevant.

It is no secret that these corporatized para-church organizations have exploited people’s misunderstanding about homosexuality to create crises where none existed. For example, a number of para-church groups have made substantial efforts to market the false notion that homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to be pedophiles. The folks who put out this material knew that no such connection existed, but they knew that such “information” would grab people’s attention and draw attention (and money) to their organization. These so-called Christians appeared to give no thought to the millions of homosexuals who unfairly maligned by having the corporatized church falsely label them as would-be pedophiles.

Further, many of these same para-church organizations have for years refused to acknowledge that homosexuality is substantially influenced by biological factors beyond a person’s voluntary control (e.g., genetic factors, epigenetic factors, etc.). In doing so, they have simply cast off homosexuals as a class of persons who are making a voluntary choice to upend societal order merely to serve certain voluntarily chosen sexual appetites.

This is the kind of garbage that Berry is criticizing. And while Berry’s criticism may be a bit too sweeping, thoughtful orthodox Christians have no one to blame but themselves. For too long, thoughtful orthodox Christians have done little to preserve the local church against the onslaughts against it by snake-oil salesmen and their para-church empires. They just sit in silence while their naive brethren are fleeced of their money and taught to hate people whom they’ve never met. At some point, there’s no real difference between silent opposition and silent complicity. So, in my opinion, Berry can’t be faulted too much for failure to note certain exceptions to the rule.

I’m not saying this because I’m a liberal. To the contrary, I’m a conservative Presbyterian along the lines of Warfield, Hodge, and Machen. And I don’t necessarily think that same-sex marriage is a boon to our society. On the other hand, it’s far less of a threat to the health of our society than a money-obsessed, market-driven, celebrity-centered form of Christianity that has overtaken our country and largely supplanted the local church. Berry, despite his being an agnostic, seems to get that in a way that Dreher doesn’t.

[Note from Rod: Leaving aside your characterization of unnamed parachurch organizations, which I don't really buy, you're saying that Berry issued a too-sweeping condemnation of conservative Christians, who deserved to be slandered for their sins. Yeah, whatever. Let me know when you agree that gay people ought to be sweepingly condemned because of what happens on lower Bourbon Street at Mardi Gras, and for Grindr. -- RD]

Honestly, the charts as given at the Daily Kos site you linked to aren’t very useful. They don’t break up the nation by sections beyond Northeast, Midwest, and National; they don’t give margin of error; they don’t disaggregate state-by-state. Worst of all, the different graphs are dealing with different time frames—in the first graph, the “after same sex marriage” is from 2005 to 2010, a five-year period; in the second graph, the “after” is a two year period, 2008-2009; and in each of the remaining graphs the “after” bar covers a single year.

Probably because of this the data shift all over the place. On the first chart, as you assert, the hate crime rate of the Northeast does exceed that of the nation by what seems to be a statistically significant amount. On the other hand, in the second, fourth, and fifth graphs, while the numbers for the Northeast are slightly higher than the national numbers, the difference looks to me well within the margin of sampling error (which margin they unfortunately didn’t give). It is clear, however, that Iowa and the Midwest, in Table 3, are substantially higher than the National or Northeastern numbers.

As to Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire being outliers, well, it’s unclear from the Daily Kos piece how “the Northeast” is being defined, but I’d assume it includes the three New England states, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. I can’t figure out the original source of the graphs, and the legends don’t say, so I don’t know. Still, three states out of nine is a clear minority. Even if you count only New England, then you have half with very high rates of anti-gay hate crimes, and three with very low rates (they’d have to be low to bring the average for the Northeast down that far). Once more, we don’t have the information to draw a clear conclusion.

I’d also point out the glaringly obvious: all these tables compare anti-gay hate crimes before and after the legalization of same-sex marriage. With the exception of Iowa, there are no Midwestern states that have SSM!. Moreover, no Southern states have SSM. Since it is mostly the Northeaster states that have legalized SSM in the first place, it stands to reason that there would be more reactions against it there. There would no such reactions for, say, Kentucky or West Virginia because SSM has not been legalized in those states. The only good way to compare would be to look at the reactions to legalized SSM in the Northeast vs. legalized SSM in the Midwest or in the South. Since most Midwestern and all Southern states lack legal SSM, this is not possible. There is only one data point, Iowa.

Actually, though, that data point supports my contention. The increase in anti-gay hate crimes in less-secular Iowa after SSM spiked much higher than occurred in the more-secular Northeast. Iowa was higher than Massachusetts, about even, within statistical error, with New Hampshire, and lower only than Vermont. Since Vermont was the first state to legalize gay domestic partnerships, and one of the first to legalize SSM, it’s not really surprising that the reaction would be stronger there. As time goes on and SSM is more widespread, I’d imagine reactions would be less intense.

Another couple of things: since the nation at large does not have SSM, these charts must be comparing the rise in hate crimes in the states that implemented them (where the effect would obviously be greater) to a rise in other states without SSM, presumably because of what people there heard or felt about SSM in other states. Thus, in effect, you’re comparing apples and oranges. Finally, to get a true comparison between secular Northeastern states and Southern highly religious states, you’d have to wait until SSM is implemented there, and compare the stats with what’s here. As I said, I think Iowa is telling, but we don’t have the data yet.

As to the map at Esquire, the state-by-state map does not disaggregate anti-gay crimes from others, so it’s absolutely useless in this context. Regarding the Canadian stats, you admit it doesn’t disaggregate the gay-bashing stats, so they’re useless, too.

I will concede that “misrepresent” was too strong a word for me to use earlier. We say things in the heat of blogging that we think better of later. I do believe that the data do not support your contentions; nor do they give enough date to support mine, either. At best, the data they give is incomplete; at worst, there is a hint—see above about Iowa—that there may be potential for more violence in the Midwest and South as SSM is implemented there. It’s also useful to point out this from the Kos article: “As of 2011 30% of all anti-gay hate groups were active in those few swaths of America where same-sex marriage is (or temporarily was) on the books.” This implies that such groups are setting up in states as they implement SSM; and since the first states to do so were Northeastern, such groups—with the attendant results—wound up there, too. This is yet another confounding factor. Still, I’m willing to admit that the data—as opposed to anecdotes—do not confirm my contentions of the connections between Evangelical culture and gay-bashing; nor do they confirm your refutation thereof.

I guess what it comes down to is this: you say you haven’t had any strong experience of greater gay-bashing in what you call “redneckville”. You know what? I believe you. I think you are wrong about causality, but I believe what you say about your personal experience. You know what? People experience the same environments different ways. Talk to a popular jock, a sullen loner, a cheerleader, a member of the academic team, a kid who grew up in the area, and a kid who transferred in junior year about what their high school was like. You’ll get six different—perhaps very much different—answers. Does this mean some are lying or deluded? Not necessarily. Life is different for a jock than it is for a sullen loner.

You disagree with the causality that I—and several others here—posit, and you dislike my reading of the statistics. You also note that your experience is different from mine. Therefore you call me a liar. I’m going to keep it civil here, but at the very least, that’s inappropriate. I think your interpretation is wrong, but I don’t doubt your anecdotes are true. Whether or not you believe it, my anecdotes are true, too.

Even Rod has posted the video of the Evangelical preacher telling parents they ought to smack their sissy sons around. Several others here, as well as myself, have posted link after link after link to Evangelical or Fundamentalist pastors saying things like “gays deserve death”. I could post a slew, but it’s getting boring. I guess you might argue that hearing stuff like that doesn’t affect people’s actions; or you might argue that they’re outliers. Maybe so; but pending a really in-depth sociological study, neither of us has any way of knowing, do we? Maybe you’re right; maybe religion has nothing to do with likelihood to gay-bash; but maybe I’m right. Despite my disagreement with your position, I’m willing to posit that you may be correct; something you seem unwilling to do the other way. That’s fine. It is what it is regardless of what either of us thinks.

M_Young: I don’t necessarily assume that by saying she was beaten up at school every single day, Sharon was necessarily saying this: “A violent incident occurred to me on school property during class time every school day of the year—that is, 180 out of 180 days per year—during my school days as a result of my parents’ being gay”. If I say, “This computer is always messing up!” I don’t mean it is doing so, second by second, for all eternity. Also, if you read what she wrote, she spoke of getting jumped on the way to or from school—not necessarily at school. I would point out that most teachers will tell you that a lot of subtle bullying—sometimes even violent—occurs at school in ways that are hard to eliminate completely. Anyway, my point is that there seems to be a bias against accepting people’s tales of gay bashing, for whatever reason.

Heather: I’m not interested in replying to most of what you say, but I do need to point out this: You refer to “Podunk KY”. I live in a small town, Podunk if you will. However, one of the incidents I mentioned was in Louisville. Out of the three hundred or so Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S., Louisville’s is the 42nd largest. Call it what you will, Louisville is not Podunk.

I’m a bit late to this thread–and it seems to have taken a somewhat comical direction (are we really debating which identity-group has committed the most acts of violence against the other?)–I thought I’d respond briefly. To wit, Berry’s traditional/former arguments for marriage are not rooted solely in fidelity. His account of marriage is contingent on gender, it is inescapably heterosexual. Those who insist otherwise, like many in this thread, simply haven’t read or understood Berry’s arguments surrounding sexual and marital ethics.

Specifically, they need to read “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.” Central to Berry’s sexual ethic is the notion that sex is never safe. Sex is “dangerous” not simply because it could result in STD’s, emotional trauma, etc., but because it is essentially, naturally, inescapably (even when contraceptives are employed) procreative. In other words, Berry’s sexual ethic is rather Catholic: sex is an indissolubly procreative act. This means marriage is an indissolubly procreative institution/relationship.

This is precisely why Berry is so committed to the institution of marriage, and why he believes fidelity is so important within marriage. He is not, as some of you seem to think, suggesting that fidelity is a self-fulfilling good, that we should be faithful in marriage just ‘cuz it’s the right thing to do. Rather, marriage and fidelity are essential because they are the only practices that can render sexuality in some measure “safe”; they provide the only setting in which the procreative effects of sex can be safeguarded and “managed” fully and appropriately.

Of course, none of this in itself constitutes an argument against homosexual marriage. But it does mean that Berry’s typical understanding of both sex and marriage does not provide for or include either homosexuality or homosexual marriage. In short, Berry’s recent remarks are in fact incongruent with his earlier writings. And by “earlier,” I don’t mean 30 years ago; these are ruminations he’s repeated as recent as 5 years ago.

Can Berry alter his thinking? Sure. But the stakes are fairly high in this case. It’s not simply a matter of saying, “Uh, sure. I guess homosexuals can be faithful and loving too.” No, it requires a fundamental rethinking of his entire sexual ethic–a rethinking, by the way, that doesn’t exactly comport with his broader concern for naturalness and givenness.

I’m not so sure that Berry is changing his thinking. One can certainly hold traditional heterosexual marriage in high esteem and promote its virtues, and yet concede that the civil law should recognize other arrangements that fail to conform to that ideal. The two positions are not mutually exclusive.

Also, based on Rod’s dismissive comments above, it strikes me that some are giving too little weight to the cultural repercussions of gay-bashing conducted by what Berry refers to as “political churches.” Many evangelicals, in particular, have sensationalized this issue in a grotesque and mean-spirited way. Anyone who denies this has been living under a rock. I don’t think that Berry was intending to take a swipe at all Christians, or even all conservative Christians. He was directing his comments specifically to those Christians who’ve made gay-bashing into something of a cottage industry. So, I don’t see that he said anything all that controversial. I certainly don’t sense that he’s speaking about me.

Re-thinking one’s sexual ethos, like re-thinking anything, often comes after the fact, after one has realized that one was wrong, and that what one anathematized before, isn’t deserving of that treatment.

It’s very much akin to science, when one makes a discovery that contradicts one’s previous theories. The re-thinking occurs after the discovery, not before it. An empirically-minded individual learns to re-think their world in retrospect, after observing the world as it is, not by pre-figuring how things are supposed to be, and seeing things in that light, regardless of what one’s eyes say.

M. Young – at a distance of 20 years it is certainly possible there were days when the primary bullies were out sick, had other victims or just weren’t in the mood to beat the crap out of other kids. I may have exaggerated. But it was every single day that kids were made to be afraid to go to school – and it was institutionally supported. I’m glad you can’t imagine it, but that doesn’t make it untrue. And I admit, I’m a little surprised that you find it so alien, given the history of violence between children which really only very recently has been given any attention.

The only way something that you find so shocking could have continued is that it was permitted – that is, you ask exactly the right question. It was permitted much as the way intimidation and violence were institutionally permitted and encouraged during early de-segregation, much as intimidation and violence against Jewish kids were permitted and encourage by institutions with a history of anti-semitism, the bullying and violence towards gay kids was INSTITUTIONAL. Your question “how could that happen and the teachers not know” is the wrong one – most of the teachers knew and didn’t see kids punishing each other for something they too believed was wrong as bad or worthy of attention. If they did, (and a few were very kind) the larger institution did not – you are right, this couldn’t pass unnoticed. But that’s the problem of implicitly supported institutional violence – it doesn’t pass unnoticed, and it builds on acceptance from the larger culture.

I don’t want to see that institutionalized violence turned against conservative Christian kids – or anyone. But unlike gay families, that had no history of oppression of the majority, it is going to take some acknowledgement and public working out to deal with that – truth and reconciliation is precisely the correct term for it, for keeping the previously oppressed and angry from turning on those who did them harm. So far, however, there’s no real evidence that Conservative Christians are subject to any harm even remotely related to the harm that they helped inflict.

As for the history of marriage, I take leave to differ on the idea that it has been structurally similar for a thousand years – it has not. The nearly equally high rates of divorce and contraception use in Christian households suggests completely otherwise, as does the last 4 decade of interfaith marriage – including cross-Christian marriage (on the WASP side of my family the fact that my grandmother married a Polish Catholic was a huge scandal in the 40s – it was just NOT done.)

And, one can make the same claims of any sea-change in marriage as of gay marriage – none of the prior changes in marriage involved divorce on a large scale. None of them involved a shift away from marriage that was about property to marriage that was about individual love etc… That is, until it was actually done, no sea-changes in marriage looked like the previous changes – and yet I think few of us would argue that the abolition of polygamy or love matches or some model that permits divorce (if not as often as we use it) is a wholly bad thing – we’ve learned to live with it, as you all will learn to live with gay marriage.

[Note from Rod: Sharon, aside from the gay marriage question, I think bullying of all kinds is, in many places, institutionally supported. Many different kinds of kids are afraid to go to school because of the bullying that takes place there, and the official indifference of the authorities. To a mild extent, I was that kid. It's not so much a matter of gay or straight, black or white, but of simply power dynamics, and privilege. -- RD]

“. It’s not so much a matter of gay or straight, black or white, but of simply power dynamics, and privilege. — RD]”

well, i’m sure elementary and middle school bullies and their victims (or subjects, to be ‘nice’ about it) were quite aware of the societal power dynamics and privilege and the like that was floating around. I guess they were quite wise to call kids like me ‘faggot’ and ‘sissy’ all the time.

as to saying to Sharon “aside from gay marriage question…”, wouldn’t the proper phrasing be ‘in addition to the gay marriage question….’?

and, finally, as to being ‘nice’ to a certain poster who, to me, and several others, didn’t seem to be too nice herself, please take a gander at her two personal blogs.
There is no love, no respect, no tolerance, no good words for gays. I’m not asking for love, but I’m certainly not going to blithely say nothing when an entire group of human beings are (quite nastily) lambasted, and yes, bullied. Especially when there is no cause for it.

I can’t find the original comment, but it sure seemed to me that you were saying kids at your school were violently beaten every day. Now it seems you are saying they (you?) were ‘bullied’, a much vaguer term. Being called names is not getting a beat down. Maybe I’m old school, but ‘sticks and stones’ — that sort of thing.

Now, I could say I was ‘bullied’, because I had quite severe (like Accutane requiring severe) acne. I remember one girl — as my condition was developing in late middle school — calling me ‘Clearosil-ohalic’ repeatedly. It didn’t ruin my life. It was, in fact, part of life. Eventually I got fed up and put a stop to it, through the application of a little physical pressure –nothing that would ‘leave a mark’ and no striking, but I exerted some pain on her and told her in no uncertain terms to never say anything about me again. I suppose I bullied the bully — and it worked.

In the event, I did not receive any adult intervention, before or after my confrontation with my nemesis. Nor would I have thought to ask for any, even though I know that some had witnessed the taunting. And my nemesis, to her credit, did not go running to the authorities. This, I think, is pretty normal life in a middle school. Adult authorities can’t intervene in every, or even many, instances of name calling or social friction. Part of education is learning how to deal with nasty people. Some times very minor violence would result. “Bike racks at 3:00″ used to be a semi-common occurrence, a couple times a month for the total school. The occasional bloody nose or black eye was the worst of any encounter.

By high school, I have no recollection of anything similar, either participating in or being victim of, or seeing, or even hearing about. We did have one ‘learning disabled’ kid who we mocked a bit — but he was so out of it I don’t think he even noticed. Certainly he came to school every day, did his own thing during breaks. Which, if I recall, included picking leaves off of campus trees and talking to them. He was so out of it I don’t think he’d hear us shoot ‘Hey, leave the tree alone — it didn’t do anything to you.

Maybe it’s just my lower middle class upbringing, or having 4 siblings (including an older brother who regularly pounded on me). I guess I can’t understand your emphasis on victimization, and imagine you’ll never understand people like me who counsel kids to suck it up.